CCA News
Research, Recombine, Reinvent: Art and Science at CCA
Posted on Tuesday, June 16, 2009, by Lindsey Westbrook
Frederick Loomis, The DIOS Neuroprocessor . . . a Proposal for the Cover of the New Yorker, 2008
It's 3 p.m., and the Interface exhibition opens in four hours, but Media Arts chair Barney Haynes is calm amid a sea of laptops and electronics. "It'll all come together," he says. "Well, most of it will."
The exhibition, now in its ninth year, is the culmination of the semester's work for several different courses related to technology and interactivity in art; this time the courses represented are Recombinant Media, Chain Reaction, and Intro to Max Signal Processing. These interdisciplinary studios—open to all CCA students with junior standing or above—represent the college's best and most idealistic intentions: a true mixing of theory and practice, and the bringing together of multiple disciplines into a situation that is intellectually stimulating, dynamic, and extraordinarily productive.
The students excitedly describe their projects. Kirby McKenzie and her friend Samantha have created an installation called Cakewalk, which is something like musical chairs. Participants walk around a patch of sod while music plays, then depending on where they're standing when the music stops, a picnic basket may open to reveal the makings of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which they are then invited to heat up on a Foreman grill and eat. In Lana Nichols's choose-your-own-adventure installation piece, the user pedals a stationary bike facing a video screen and takes a virtual ride through a supermarket, a BMW dealership, and the San Francisco airport BART station. Kate Richards's Toy Garden is an interactive flower garden that incorporates tactile interfaces, switches, speakers, and live grubs.
Lico Wolffs has created a virtual violin, where the user puts on cuffs equipped with sensors and waves his or her hands in the air to actually create violin music in the gallery space. Later, at the opening, there was a magical moment when Media Arts faculty member Todd Blair, who cotaught this family of courses from the beginning, made his first appearance on campus since being in a serious accident and suffering massive brain trauma two years ago. In particular he has trouble with his right hand. He tried out Wolffs's piece and amazed everyone with his performance.
The backend of most of these works uses an application called Max/MSP/Jitter, which was originally developed for the creation of electronic music. It is a graphical programming environment that enables visually minded individuals to "code" without actually having to write lines of computer code. Its ease of use makes it possible for students to research, conceptualize, and execute technologically complex projects in a single semester.
It's not just Media Arts students making these things, but also students from Glass, Industrial Design, Architecture, Painting/Drawing. . . . Art students these days arrive at college not only with impressive technological aptitude, but also with real enthusiasm for learning about technology—even fairly hard-core computer programming—especially when it enables the creation of sophisticated art pieces. Their fundamental concept of what art is embraces an astonishing range of media and approaches.
The traditional gallery and museum world is only barely ready for this. Most museums draw clear lines between media, compartmentalizing their collections, their curators, and even their gallery spaces into tidy categories: painting, photography, architecture, design, and (almost always last on the list) media arts. The real world, in art and otherwise, is of course not so tidy. Pushing the art world toward an ever-more-ambitious interdisciplinarity is going to be one of the most important contributions that CCA students make in upcoming decades.
CCA faculty such as Susan Costabile and George Homsy, who teach Math & Media and Basic Electronics, respectively, are working to expand this envelope both in the classroom and in their own art. They exemplify the artist/scientist/technologist hybrid, operating at the cutting edge of interactive creativity. Costabile received her engineering degree at UC Berkeley and is also an accomplished artist working with improvisational video and photography. Homsy received a PhD from MIT and has been working with artists for years, programming and designing custom electronics. CCA's proximity to Silicon Valley also helps it stay in the vanguard. In past years, for instance, Barney Haynes and Todd Blair facilitated CCA's involvement in the Yahoo Design Expo, an opportunity for students around the world to show off their innovative meldings of creative design and interactive technology.
There are other perspectives on the mixing of art and science, of course, and CCA is big enough to accommodate them. Jon Meyer, a visiting faculty member for the 2009–10 academic year, makes a clear distinction between science and art and is wary of mixing the two, either in the classroom or in his own work.
"It's easy to assume that, because artists are 'creative,' having artists and scientists collaborate will automatically be beneficial. This is an oversimplification. The scientists I know are already extremely creative. And art is not about making things better, but rather about asking important and difficult questions. I think we should strive for cross-pollination as a model, rather than collaboration for collaboration's sake."
Meyer holds a degree in computer science and also has an MFA from Goldsmiths College in London. He just won the highly selective New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship award. His invitation to be a CCA visiting artist resulted from Rachel Schreiber's (director of Humanities and Sciences) desire to enhance the college's science curriculum.
His two undergraduate courses this year will be Body & Cognition and Data Visualization. And he's taking an aggressive, immersion-type approach, having students read primary scientific sources, explore science history and theory, and engage in practical experiments that involve almost no "art" in the conventional sense. "I'm hoping that they will be engaged, not overwhelmed," he says. "We will start Body & Cognition with a discussion of sound and speech. Getting people to make sounds in the classroom is a good icebreaker!
"I'll be focusing more on science fundamentals than on technical skills. What do the notions of truth and provability mean? Who are the philosophers of science that artists should be aware of? What are the famous historical debates between artists and scientists? There is a large area of knowledge here that all artists should have."
Jody Gillerman has yet another take on the matter. A fine artist who is totally self-taught in all things media-related, she has been on CCA's faculty since 1976. For many years she has taught a course called Genetics to Time Travel, in which students choose a scientific field and incorporate it into an artwork, but she doesn't recognize "science-art" as any kind of distinct genre. Each artwork stands alone, with its own unique set of motivations, its own conceptual underpinnings. Science, to her, is so broad that it is almost indefinable as a field, a category, since there are so many different ideas of what science is. Does "science" include the paranormal? Time travel? Depends on who you ask. And the same goes for art.
"I don't like telling people how to interpret anything," Gillerman says. "In the first part of the course, where we explore the history of science in art, we look at everything from Leonardo da Vinci to chimp paintings. We take field trips to the Wave Organ, the Camera Obscura, the James Turrell piece at the de Young museum, Moss Beach marine reserve, and the Chabot Space and Science Center (to look through the telescopes on a Friday night)."
In past semesters her students have enthusiastically developed projects around everything from nanotechnology to astronomy. Ultimately the only requirements are that their science research has to be rigorous, and their artwork has to have a strong concept behind it. The off-campus exhibition that the students organize at the end of the course is as eclectic as you'd suspect.
A small selection of CCA faculty, students, and alumni working at the intersection of art and science:
Jordan Geiger
(Architecture faculty)
Jordan Geiger's spring 2009 studio, Utility: Architecture and Embedded Electronic Media (cotaught with North Pitney and Shona Kitchen), examined and projected future manifestations of our increasingly networked, sensate, responsive built environment, exploring the concept of the future media city that hybridizes interactivity with architecture. The students examined PG&E's Substation 1 in San Francisco's Mission District and proposed retrofits that involved the introduction of sensory and responsive electronics. "What potentials exist for media being integrally embedded within these networks? What new, alternative media experiences can emerge?"
Donald Day
(Media Arts faculty)
Donald Day has been teaching at CCA since 1976. He is both an electronics engineer and an artist. He likes quirky, unwieldy ideas that defy purpose and closure. "Students are effortlessly inventive," he says, "and it is great fun to improvise back to them some unrealized echoes of what they've just thought up. I am there to help them realize and mutate their technology-related visions and animate their robotic dramas." He collaborated with CCA alum Steve Dye (Film/Video 1990)—a combination of kites and floating objects—that made its public debut in May 2009 as part of the Illuminated Corridor multimedia extravaganza in Oakland.
North Pitney
(Media Arts faculty)
"I'm an artist who identifies more with tinkerers and inventors than with painters and sculptors," says North Pitney. "I combine robotics and programming with performance and philosophy to create works that have gestural interest, or some nascent cognitive presence." The Creature is a collaboration with Barney Haynes. Its body is culled from Haynes's vast "library" of electronic and industrial detritus, and Pitney's research into machine perception and intelligence informs its behavior. By means of sensors, it gains a crude perception of its surroundings (including the presence of an audience) and its orientation, and then translates this data into motion and behavior via memory/action algorithms.
Marianne Rogoff
(Writing and Literature faculty)
Marianne Rogoff’s English 2 course for the last two semesters has centered on a single book, Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist, a collection of essays linking contemporary findings in neuroscience with visionary knowledge dreamed up by writers and artists a hundred years ago. "Concepts like Walt Whitman’s poetic 'body electric' are proven to have physical origins in our brains and bodies. Lehrer is amazingly able to instruct the reader in the anatomy of the brain while offering insight into how we process literature, art, photography, and music." Students researched and read outward from that starting point, then engaged in diverse writing assignments related to everything from Marcel Proust's famous madeleines to Disney's Fantasia to Gertrude Stein's attempts to strip language of meaning.
JP Kelly
(Individualized Major 2009)
"I want my work to encourage people to take a critical look at government policies, current events, and their own actions. I use interactivity to draw viewers in, playing on their natural curiosity so they'll investigate the work closely and pick up on its message." Which doesn't mean JP Kelly doesn't engage occasionally in a project that's more about seduction than investigation. Boidian Motion, a collaboration with Thomas Bates (Individualized Major 2009), debuted at CCA's 2008 Interface exhibition. In the piece, images projected onto a table influence the behaviors of robotic vehicles, whose movements are tracked by a camera, and then that new information in turn influences the projected images. The computer uses an artificial-life algorithm called Boids that simulates the flocking behavior of birds.
Frederick Loomis
(MFA 2004)
During the past 20 years, Frederick Loomis has been developing a portfolio of more than 100 drawings and a written manuscript that will eventually become The Third Testament: The Genesis Story of the Coming Race of Human Computers. "Computers in a human form will be the next stage of the evolution of our species," he says. "I do not intend to invent them. Others will do this. My role is to write and communicate the prophecy and to architecturally design a 'soul' for them: a computer chip called the DIOS Integration Operating System Neuroprocessor." Loomis has exhibited his work in progress in several venues already.
Patricia Olynyk
(MFA 1988)
Patricia Olynyk investigates the often-tenuous relationships among human culture, science, and the environment. "My work calls upon viewers to expand their awareness of the worlds they inhabit, whether those worlds are their own bodies or the spaces that surround them." Her latest series, Probe, involves a vast inventory of prosthetic devices and medical instruments, collected for their historical value. They offer an incisive commentary on the human desire to fetishize and even anthropomorphize objects that supplement or probe the human body.
Kolle Kahle-Riggs
(Jewelry / Metal Arts 2011)
Kolle Kahle-Riggs was one of three winners of the 2009 Past Infinity: CCA Math and Science Fair, which features works made in courses such as The Art of Mathematics, Holography, Biology as the Art of Life, and Natural History & the San Francisco Bay Area. She jewelry pieces she presented are inspired by the forms of human blood cells; the large brooch represents a macrophagic white blood cell that is about to attack and engulf a foreign particle in the bloodstream. "I am fascinated by the amazing microscopic forms that exist within our bodies, and with these pieces I wanted to inspire curiosity, appreciation, and exploration. I also love the idea of wearing tiny parts from within us on the outsides of our bodies."
Jeannette Peters
(Fashion Design 2010)
You Wear Who You Are, Jeanette Peters's winning entry in the 2009 Past Infinity: CCA Math and Science Fair, offers a biological take on the perception of identity and clothing, and the ways in which they are frequently intertwined. "I was thinking about how your genetic makeup informs your physical appearance, and how your physical appearance reflects your genetic makeup; the two are intertwined. Knitting lends itself well to the idea of visualizing a DNA strand. The entire dress is made up of two long lengths of yarn, looped and locked together."
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